4. Chapter 4
4
HIM
A s if it hadn’t been tricky enough to find a wildflower in the desert in November, I discovered that morning that my “reward” would be spending the next few days building a wire fence around the prickly pears to keep the javelinas from digging up and eating them. The look I must have given the housekeeper when she told me and the little cluck of her tongue in response said it all. What, did His Royal Highness expect that just because he had, against all logic, gotten in the master’s good graces with his little performance the other night, he’d never have to do this kind of thing again?
Well, no, of course not, but I’d certainly hoped .
“I’m sorry,” she’d said over a plate of toast in the slaves’ common area that morning. “But the master says it needs to be done if we want any cactuses left at all. Plus, the gardener is gone, the landscaping service isn’t available this week, and heaven knows I’m not going to do it. He expects it to be done by the time he gets back.”
“Back from where?”
“He’s had to fly to LA unexpectedly to meet with his lawyers,” she said. “The valet went with him. And if you’re wondering why no one told you, it’s because I only found out late last night. And by the way, if you’re looking at the master being away as an opportunity to get away with murder, forget it.”
It must have been screamingly obvious how rapidly the gears in my brain were turning. But as always, that was nothing a charming smile and a witty remark couldn’t fix. “I promise, no murder. Petty larceny at most .”
I received the standard will-never-admit-to-being-charmed eye roll in return. This was too easy. Hell, there was almost no limit to what the master’s absence might offer the opportunity to accomplish. Having as much sex as possible with his daughter, while clearly the most enjoyable part of it was only the start.
Now if only I could figure a way out of building this goddamn fence.
The housekeeper promptly handed me a sheet of detailed instructions on where to place each post. “Look, if you make solid progress on this, I won’t tell anyone if you want to take it easy for the next few nights. The girl, too. I’ll take on the evenings myself, and then we can all enjoy a good night’s sleep,” she said. “If it helps, we had one half-built last year before it washed away in the monsoons, so most everything you need should be out in the shed already. If you run out of wire, let me know and I’ll arrange to have some delivered.”
Her words were mild, but her meaning was clear: Just try to weasel your way out of this, smart guy, I dare you. Oh well. It didn’t sound too hard, and I’d certainly been ordered to do similar things in the past. Maybe I could think of it as an exercise in landscape architecture.
The first step—besides finding out just what the hell javelinas were, to which the answer was, no joke, some kind of wild pig—was trudging outside and surveying the garden, where the porcine invaders had already been hard at work, strewing divots and mounds of overturned dirt all along the perimeter of the property.
With a sigh, I grabbed a spade and whatever other useful tools I could scavenge from the shed, then searched in vain for some gloves, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the gardener had snatched them when he’d left out of pure spite. I then turned my attention to the stacks of wooden stakes and heavy bales of woven wire stacked against the wall, which, given that the wheel on the barrow was currently broken and needed parts—something else I blamed the gardener for—I would have to drag across the garden individually.
Two hours later, the mercury was still soaring, and my progress consisted of a series of holes dug eight inches into the ground and two stakes, one of them draped with a disorganized and bloody mass of wire, which had sliced into my hands in a dozen places already, the blood running down my wrists in thin streaks. Now I wrestled artlessly and stubbornly to unroll another bale and drag it across the yard, muttering curses to myself in Luxembourgish.
Despite the housekeeper’s offer, it looked like I was going to be working overtime if I wanted to make any progress on this thing at all by tonight—when I hoped to make the most of my time with Louisa when she returned from campus after taking her exam, which should be taking place right about now.
And, yes, while there were many fairly obscene things near the top of my to-do list, support and hand-holding—no matter how the exam had gone—were also on the agenda, and, to my surprise, I wasn’t looking forward to those any less.
That might have been enough to still keep me upbeat despite it all. Except that after a few more messages last night and again this morning, Maeve still hadn’t answered my question about whether anyone had hurt her.
In fact, she hadn’t answered at all. And every minute she didn’t answer added to my swirling cloud of dread. I knew there was a good chance that someone on her end had confiscated whatever device she was using and was now using it to try to track me , which meant the phone was radioactive. I’d already kept it a week longer than I should have. Louisa herself had warned me about this. The smartest thing to do would be to start a brush fire out in the garden and toss it in.
But then there was a chance I’d never hear from Maeve again, ever.
And just as I had taken shelter under a paloverde, desperate for even a minute or so out of the brutality of the sun, a tall shadow blocked it all out.
It was Max Langer, standing there in tan linen suit trousers, floral shirt, and aviator sunglasses, dark hair artfully sculpted, looking as cool and breezy as could be, with a bottle of Luxembourg blackcurrant liqueur and two glasses full of ice under his arm.
Fuck, he’d been serious . Not to mention that once again, I hadn’t heard a car pull up or a door open, but there Langer was, anyway. Just … there.
“Um, Master Wainwright-Phillips is away,” I said as I reluctantly stood up, even though it was already obvious that if that was who Langer was looking for, he wouldn’t be here .
“Good thing I didn’t come to see Keith,” he replied, whipping off the expensive shades to reveal calm but maddeningly inexpressive blue eyes. “I came to see you.”
It was official: he was here to cash in the chip he’d won by getting rid of the gardener and not turning us in, exactly as I’d predicted. So much for Lucky Sevens magic. My hot streak was as dead as I was no doubt about to be.
Let’s review: he knew about me. He knew about Louisa. He almost certainly knew about Maeve and probably was the one holding her captive himself, assuming she was even still alive. He had wealth that rivaled the GDP of small nations and influence to bend the will of kings. And here I was, trying to go up against him armed with nothing but hope and a garden trowel.
In fact, I think there was a story in the Bible about this kind of situation. Which I now really wished I’d paid more attention to back when the old professor had ordered me to read it, rather than entertaining myself by working out pericyclic reactions in the margins.
Besides, slaves didn’t have guests . What, was I supposed to show him into the parlor for cucumber sandwiches? I wasn’t even allowed to use the furniture, let alone invite anyone else to. Besides, the timing couldn’t be worse. Thanks to the reflection I’d caught in the sunglass frames, I knew that besides a healthy sheen of sweat, I had dirt and blood all over my hands, embedded under my nails, and streaked across my face from all the times I’d pushed my hair out of my eyes. The least this guy could have done was wait until I got a chance to spray myself with the garden hose.
But Langer didn’t seem to care. He handed me a damp, plush, lavender-scented towel from inside the house—the kind decidedly reserved for guests, not slaves—and watched as I gratefully dabbed it over the bloody streaks.
“Courtesy of your housekeeper, same as the ice,” he said, holding up the fancy glasses. “She’s a gem. Total efficiency, total discretion. Of course, the box of German chocolates I gave her didn’t hurt,” he said. He set the bottle behind a boulder, uncapped it, and poured. “Now’s our chance to have the conversation we didn’t get to have the other night with all the company around. In English, even.”
“I don’t know, Max,” I said. “Are you sure this meeting can’t be an email? I’ve got a really packed agenda today. When it comes to javelinas, time is money.” I picked up the spade and gestured behind me, indicating the wooden posts and the chaotic piles of bloody wire.
“Seriously? He’s got you digging pig holes?” Langer coolly surveyed the mounds of earth and the chewed-up cactus. “Come on. Forget this stupid shit and walk with me.”
“But—”
“You can tell Keith if he has a problem with his pigs, possums, rats, raccoons, or any other species of furry mammal, he can take it up with me. I’ll send one of my security guys over with a high-powered rifle, no charge.”
“Um, thanks, but then I’m left with a pile of dead pigs to explain.”
“I guess you’re right.” Langer fished out a phone from his pocket, dialed, and probably spoke a total of five words before hanging up. “Fence’ll be done by this afternoon. Prost .”
I stared at the proffered glass. I wasn’t so arrogant as to think a billionaire would choose to waste his entire afternoon driving all the way across town to personally murder a slave in an elaborate poisoning caper, but Max Langer had already proved himself a surprising man.
But since there was no use protesting in the face of the power of the almighty dollar, I shoved the spade under my arm and yanked the glass from Langer’s hand, drinking it as we made our way down the stone path into the cooler parts of the garden, weaving in and out of the paloverdes and chollas.
I hadn’t been allowed to drink this kind of thing regularly, but there were always opportunities during summer garden parties when, after the guests had been suitably inebriated, I’d been able to slip away easily with Maeve and some of the other young slaves and lie in the grass for a few minutes and listen to the crickets.
Grass. That was one thing I missed. And forests, real forests full of evergreens. Damn, here I was getting nostalgic. Was this part of Langer’s plot to lower my defenses so he could strike?
Walking side by side with any free man was surreal enough, let alone a would-be billionaire tech mogul. We were the exact same height, in fact: eye to eye, nose to nose. The rich guy in his spotless clothing, jacket draped over his arm, and me in dirt-covered work clothes. How very appropriate.
“How did that happen?” Langer pointed to the pus-filled blister on my palm. “Accident?”
Your intern. “Let’s go with that.”
“I had ‘accidents,’ too, growing up.”
I raised my head curiously.
“My dad liked the switch and the belt, but he really loved heat the most. The cigarette; the clothes iron; the stove. He was a true artist. A real Michelangelo of pain. You want to see the scars?”
“I’ll take your word for it. Thanks.”
“My mother and I were lucky to get out alive. Oh, and besides putting her in the ER on several occasions, he was fucking around on her constantly, and he loved shitting where he ate, so it was mostly with his own slaves. Finally, she took me back to her family in Germany. That required punishment, of course, so he made sure she got nothing in the divorce, which meant I spent my teen years in the slums of the most piece-of-shit industrial towns on the Rhine, while he remarried and spent winters in Baden-Baden with his new wife. Never got an invite. Meanwhile, my mom got a job supervising a team of cleaning slaves. At least they got free food and housing. She could barely survive on the wages she made.”
“Funny, I hear that a lot from people who have never been slaves.”
“I know. And I’m not saying you didn’t have it worse.”
“Oh,” I said, twisting the stem of the glass between my fingers. “Thanks, I guess?”
“Long story short, my mom died, my dad got sick, and I saved all the wages I made at my box factory job—the less said about that, the better—for a ticket back. I wanted what was left of his estate. Better it actually go toward building something than paying for his third wife’s fifth facelift, so I took on the role of the loyal, grieving son to much critical acclaim. Of course what I really wanted to do was smother the asshole with a pillow, but I had to settle for seeing him waste away to nothing and lose control of his bodily functions. But it paid off when he changed his will and left everything to me. The house, the money, and the slaves. I freed them, including my half-sister whom I didn’t even know was my sister. Now she works for me. I used the inheritance as capital to launch FableFlow. You know the rest.”
Langer met my eyes, trying to gauge my reaction. He was trying to form a rapport, clearly. I wasn’t sure why. I was sure I had to prevent him from succeeding. So I said nothing.
“As you probably know, my dad sold and bought slaves. Tortured and/or worked to death several football teams’ worth of them. At some point, I decided that wasn’t going to be me. Since I took over his empire, it hasn’t been.”
“Cool story. You’re a true humanitarian. Really. Are we about done here?”
To my surprise, Langer just looked at me and took a long, satisfied sip. Not only did being called out not seem to bother this guy, it actually seemed to be something he got a weird enjoyment out of. To me, who never called a free person out on anything without first deciding it was worth the grievous bodily harm it would earn me in return, it was a notion as strange as it was impossible to resist.
“Fast forward to this week, when you , under threat of a flogging, solved the number one problem of the most valuable company in my portfolio.”
I froze in mid-sip. “I did?”
“I got on a call last week with the board at Orbital Dynamics. They were stunned when I told them the where-the-holes-aren’t theory. They asked how I figured it out, and I told them I didn’t—the slave who served me my cocktail did. They just laughed. They thought I was joking. I haven’t checked the ticker, but their stock price is probably tripling right about now, along with my net worth, given I’m the majority shareholder. If there was any justice, you would be drinking champagne in a hot tub surrounded by bikinis full of perky tits and tight pussy, and instead, here you are toiling away covered in dirt.”
“At least I have my pride.”
Langer chuckled. “Yeah, I have that, too. Plus a ton of other shit.”
He drained his glass and lightly tossed it in a wheelbarrow full of clippings, and I did the same, after pouring out the two-thirds I hadn’t drunk. The last thing I needed was to get buzzed and let this dude start tricking me into thinking he was actually a decent human being.
He stopped and turned to me. “Let’s not mince words, kid,” he said. “Here’s what I’ve been able to find out about you: your owner’s psychopath son raped your mother, impregnated her, and let her die in agony. You gave him exactly what he deserved, and then you did three years in hell for the crime of having the balls to try to defend your family. And you would have died out there in the fields if you hadn’t impressed a chick with your looks and impressed a dude with your brains. In other words, an age-old story: the boy with nothing saves himself using the only tools he has. That’s my favorite story in the world because it’s my story, too.”
“How did you find out?” I asked. The file alone wouldn’t have told him all of that. Phoning Luxembourg, or even Germany, maybe. I shuddered to think of anyone from any of my past lives picking up that call.
“You aren’t the only one who knows how to do detective work.”
“What else do you know?”
“Assume everything. We’ll save time that way.”
“Great,” I muttered, slumping against a mesquite.
“Look, the powers that be don’t take kindly to a slave who thinks he should still be treated like a human being,” he went on. “And they really despise the one who’s the smartest guy in the room. If you found the fucking cure for cancer tomorrow, they’d toss it in the incinerator, let millions of people die, and ship you off to dig coal, rather than admit that a slave did what none of them could do. Because admitting that would mean admitting they’re wrong. That their whole system is wrong. And then their goddamn pea brains would explode because of the cognitive dissonance of it all.”
Well, yes. Everyone knew it, but no one said it. Even slaves didn’t say it. I’d bet that abolitionist professor Louisa was so enamored with had never put it so plainly in one of her academic papers.
But just because Langer actually said it out loud didn’t mean he believed it. It just meant he had enough fuck-you money to get away with it.
“Oh,” he continued. “By the way, I have to hand it to you. Nailing your master’s daughter right under his nose. My profound respect.”
I’d begun to naively hope he’d forgotten what he’d discovered at the party the other night, or at least would pretend he had for my sake. Right now, though, I could only concentrate on not blushing as hard as I was terrified I was. “Look, it’s not—”
“Okay, fine, it’s not.” Langer just chuckled again. “That said, I have quite a few esoteric hobbies, but blackmail isn’t one of them. I don’t give a shit what you’re not doing in her bedroom while you’re pretending to tutor her. That isn’t the point of this, so relax.”
“What is the point, Max?” I bristled. “This has been just a great male bonding experience and everything. Very cathartic. But those pig holes, as you put it, don’t dig themselves.”
This guy wasn’t Santa Claus, and he wasn’t doing or saying any of this out of charity, compassion, or even friendship. This was a rich and powerful guy keeping his enemies close. I should know. I was doing the same.
“I told you, the holes are as good as done. And there’s no point unless you want there to be,” Langer said.
“And if I want there to be?”
“Then we keep talking. Yes, I’m giving you a choice.”
I blinked. I didn’t know what to do with a choice.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” asked Langer smugly. “Like something you could get used to?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So there’s something that feels even better. Something you may not have considered.”
“What’s that?”
“Telling other people what to do.”
Look, it wasn’t as if the opportunity for power hadn’t ever arisen. It had. But for a slave, power was never really power. It was a trap. Free men could be played like free women if you were careful, but you had to keep it close to the vest. If you sold out—if you lost that tiny little sliver of yourself that was yours alone—you’d turn into a rapey psycho like the old gardener, or one of those loathed slaves who would sell out a cohort to be flogged within an inch of his life for the privilege of an extra bowl of gruel. For a slave, chasing power wasn’t a formula for success. It was a formula for losing friends and whatever remaining self-respect you had, and worst of all, still being a slave.
If that was what Langer was offering, the choice was easy. “I’m not going to be your lapdog, Max. What price do you think I’ll sell out for? A place at your feet by the fireplace? Sorry. It’s hot enough here already.”
“You disappoint me.” He stopped and turned, eyes flashing electric blue. “Do you really think if I were after some broken, brainless robot to blow smoke up my ass, I’d be standing out here in this godforsaken heat, wasting my time with you? I could go down to the local auction house and walk out with fifty slaves like that without even putting a dent in my bank account.”
“So,” I replied, a very familiar feeling spreading in the pit of my stomach. “You want to buy me. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Three times in my life I’d been bought and sold. Three times it had felt more or less like this. But only one time had I faced the prospect of leaving behind anyone I cared about.
“Honestly? I thought about it. But no. And this is why,” Langer explained. “A, I don’t want to own a slave. B, I don’t need to own a slave. And C, even if A and B weren’t true, Keith won’t sell you for any price. He told me he already had an inkling of just how good of an investment you might be when he bought you, but the other night confirmed it.”
I shrugged and gestured to the holes in the ground behind me. “Funny, you could have fooled me.”
“Okay, so your master’s a bit misguided. He’s also bipolar, on like ten different medications, in debt up to his eyeballs, and if he could spend all his time on the golf course hiding from his shit show of a family, he would. In other words, he’s got enough to deal with without worrying about whether his slaves are living their best lives. In the meantime, I’m offering you a deal.”
“You’re offering him a deal. Let’s not bother pretending that I get any say in it.”
“Wrong.”
I looked at him, stunned.
“Listen. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m not only in aerospace. I’m also in software and now chemical engineering. Project White Cedar—you may have heard of it. So I need someone who understands chemistry, physics, and math. You know, the hard shit. Your kind of shit. But more importantly, someone who has the balls and ambition to help me grow and scale my companies. The engineers they keep hiring have all been neutered and/or brainwashed by their pricey, worthless educations, and I’m not getting shit from that tool of an intern who can barely stack a set of wooden blocks—who won’t be back, by the way, in case that was something you were concerned with.”
Yes. If I were with anyone but Langer, I would have pumped my fist with boyish glee. But I didn’t because I could still hear the sound the bracelet made as it fell out of Corey’s hand and pinged off the tile. He’d said it came from his boss, but maybe that wasn’t the whole truth, considering it was unlikely that his boss would promote him to threatening his enemies while planning to fire him the very next week. Still, Corey was clearly too dumb to have orchestrated that whole thing on his own. It had to have originated with someone smart. But who else was as smart as Langer? Besides me, of course.
“Come with me.”
What?
“Work with me. Consult with me. Live with me. My wife moved out two years ago. You could have your pick of ten spare rooms.”
I opened my mouth.
“Oh, and just so we’re clear, my interest in you is purely professional,” he continued. “I don’t like dick, and given your extracurricular activities, I’ll assume at the very least you can take it or leave it. And if you end up hating me, which you very well might, you can have a whole suite to yourself and never have to see my face outside of work. I don’t care. Or we can drink Bordeaux and watch association football like the good Europeans we are.”
“Well,” I began weakly, not knowing where else to start, “I support Luxembourg, and if you’ve seen them play at all in the last two decades, you’d know that’s not quite the selling point you think it is.”
He smirked.
“Look, Max, we both know how this works. If you came here to talk to the guy who decides my future, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
“Keith will still own you on paper,” he explained. “And he’ll see a percentage of the return on investment, but I’ll pay you in cash money, plus a safe to keep it in that you alone set the combination to, and a stake in the business if you want it. And if you don’t want it, fine. It’ll be your choice, not his. What do you think?”
I had spent my whole life being talked about as if I weren’t there, so I had to marvel at the strange feeling of being offered a say in what happened to me. And not just a say. A choice , and not a slave’s choice, which wasn’t really a choice at all. A real choice. A man’s choice. Almost.
But did I think Langer didn’t know all of that? That he hadn’t planned out the route to this moment step by step, beginning with the moment he’d saved us at the party? Knowing it would be as hard for me to resist his offer as someone dying of thirst to resist a poisoned oasis? I shouldn’t bow down just because I’d been offered more than I ever expected to be offered in my entire life. In fact, it was absolutely crucial that I didn’t.
Hell, if only he were the standard rich asshole who treated all slaves like garbage. That I was used to. That I could handle. This I had no blueprint for at all. No plan survives contact with the enemy. So like speed chess, I’d just have to change up the moves as I went.
“I think,” I said slowly, “you think I’m an idiot. In case you forgot, I’m property. I’m not a person. I have no legal identity. You could offer me drilling rights to all of Texas, but how the fuck can I be sure you’ll honor it when I can’t even sign a goddamn contract?”
“You think I haven’t considered this?” he countered. “There are ways. I can issue you bearer shares, which are as good as cash. I can set up an offshore safe deposit box registered to Mickey Mouse and give you the only access key. Hell, I can exchange it for gold doubloons, bury it on some rock in the Caribbean, and draw you a map with X marks the spot. You’ll get your money, guaranteed.”
“And then what?” I demanded stubbornly.
“After that, I can’t promise you anything. But once Keith sees how you can deliver, who knows what might happen?”
We both knew what he was talking about, and I kept reminding myself to breathe. If I let this guy play upon my vanity and pride and my frankly selfish yearning to finally have everything I knew I was worth—let’s face it, I’d lose any chance of finding Maeve. My entire trip here, everything I’d done so far, was void unless I found a way to beat Langer at his own game, and needless to say, instantly agreeing to everything he proposed was not that way. I took a deep breath.
“I have a better idea,” I said, even as I thought better of it. “How about instead of speculating on what might happen, we talk about what did happen? What about the tablet the other night and the sicko gardener you conveniently disposed of seemingly out of the goodness of your heart? What about German? What about, I’d hate to see you end up right back here ? And what about this?”
I dug into my pocket and whipped out the bloody bracelet.
He looked down at it coolly. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”
“What?” I exploded, more out of shock than anything. I guess I hadn’t been expecting that. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. “But—”
I stopped before I could bring up Corey because Langer was just standing there, rooted to the spot, cool and emotionless.
A creepy feeling crept up my neck.
“Go on,” he said, merely waving a hand. “I’m curious to see where you’re going with this.”
I froze. Fuck, what was I thinking? This wasn’t a fellow slave I’d just been sparring with. This was a free man, the richest, most powerful free man I’d ever met, and the old ways came rushing back now—the urge to shrink under his gaze, to curl into myself for protection, to beg for forgiveness. I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean it, sir. I’ll agree to anything you say, just please don’t chain me up and feed me to the rabid javelinas, sir.
But that would be the slave boy talking. It wasn’t the man Louisa saw in me, the one she’d once called brave, and it wasn’t the one Maeve was depending on.
“Well, here’s my theory, Max,” I finally said after a deep breath. “Maybe I know something about you. Something that could get you thrown in a mine if you’re not careful. And hey, you’re a shrewd guy, so maybe you decided that rather than crushing me like a bug, why not have some fun and flatter my ego? You know, that poor, sad slave boy who’s too smart for his own good and wants the girl he can’t have—let’s fill his head with delusions of grandeur so he drops his guard and doesn’t see the cliff coming until he walks right off it?” I finished. “Now tell me, am I getting warm?”
To my surprise, Langer didn’t explode with rage. He didn’t even move much. Just eyed me with that same disconcerting, icy look. “I’m not an idiot, either, you know,” he pointed out. “Sure, maybe there is shit I’ve done that I don’t want anyone to know about. Maybe I’m still doing it. Maybe you’re the only person alive smart enough to stop me. And if you are, it would make sense that you’re exactly who I want working for me.”
“Enemies close?”
“Exactly. Which is why,” he said, “the offer still stands.”
“Fuck your offer.”
His lips parted in a grin, seemingly more pleased by this than anything all afternoon. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Maybe I don’t want to play by your rules, Max. Maybe I want to play by my own.”
“Good. The last thing I would ever do is stop you.”
I stuck the spade under my arm and abruptly turned, but he caught me by the shoulder. I turned my face away from the intense gaze, so unused to that coming from a free man.
“One last question, kid,” he said. “You can walk away right now, no problem. If you do, this conversation stays between us and the prickly pears. You can go back to digging pig holes and nailing Curly Sue in the pantry, at least until somebody wants a can of soup and it’s game over. But ask yourself: when that happens—and it will happen—do you really think you’re going to get lucky again?”
I stared at a very specific spot on the dusty ground, my vision going all blurry for a moment.
“Wherever they throw you, you’re going to die down there, with the bonus of knowing you fucked up her life forever, too. And I don’t know if it’s her eyes, her tits, or that her snatch tastes like chocolate chip cookies, but whatever it is, it’s enough to keep you lying to yourself, and worse, lying to her , every time you look her in that sweet, innocent face. You know you’re going to get caught. You know this is going to end. And when it does, you won’t be playing by anyone’s rules but theirs ever again.”
The crippling strike, just like the fucking professor while I was off aiming for the king. You got too greedy, boy, he’d remind me while smugly sweeping my queen off the board. And left her vulnerable.
“Ah. I knew you were smart,” he said smugly. As if he thought he’d already won.
“Yeah, I am. Smart enough to tell when I’m being played,” I said. With finality, I stabbed the spade as deep in the earth as it would go and turned back toward the house.
He may have the entire board, but I still had one pawn left. And I’d done more with less.
“No deal,” I said. “Thanks for the drink. Sir .”
At first, I’d been ridiculously smug about the hiding place I’d chosen near the garden shed for the phone, the aloe, and two or three other things I wasn’t supposed to have. Sure, it had meant dodging the gardener, but like Langer, I believed in nothing if not keeping your enemies close. And now that there was no gardener, you’d think it would be just about perfect.
However, even the best hiding place quickly became a bad one when I insisted on going back there twenty fucking times a day. But what choice did I have?
I still felt disgusting—in more ways than one—and I only had a window of a few minutes to clean myself up before Louisa got home, not to mention decide exactly how little I could get away with telling her about what had just happened, assuming I hadn’t dreamed it. But instead, as soon as Langer left, I retrieved the phone and sank to the ground amid a bed of agave plants, drawing my knees to my chest and navigating to the messaging app. But there was nothing from Maeve, and all at once, the image of the mutilated girl in the desert flashed across my mind like images in a bloody slideshow.
The microchips. Of course. Because to steal a slave, you had to either disable the microchip somehow—which had never been done—or remove it. But since the chips migrated, removing them usually meant horrific injury if not death for the poor slave in question. And that didn’t even take into account what awaited the girls if they survived—and I had a feeling it wasn’t freedom.
No, I still wasn’t sure what Langer’s grand plan was, but I now had some idea of what was happening to Maeve and the other girls.
Disruption. Literally.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. No. Because another piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place.
It was only since the party— when I’d spoken to Langer —that Maeve had gone quiet.
He knew I knew. He’d known since the party that I knew.
In other words, I had fucked up the whole thing. While I’d been dicking around playing speed chess with Langer, I’d put my sister in even more danger.
Frantically, I tapped out another message, asking if she was okay and pleading with her to respond, even while the image— the image—flashed into my mind. The one of Maeve, the purest soul I’d ever known, screaming, pleading, strangled, gagged, restrained, violated, broken. Another family member lost because I couldn’t ever seem to use my supposed brainpower for anything other than solving dry scientific equations with no practical use but making rich guys even richer. Fuck, if there was any reason to resent the education I’d been given, it was that. At least as an illiterate slave toiling in the fields, I wouldn’t be haunted by everything that, despite my gifts, I was still failing at.
After checking the time again, I minimized the messaging app and turned to the contacts. Up until recently, Louisa’s number had been the only one saved there, but a few days ago—against all my better judgment—I’d added a second one.
I rose, shielding my face from the midday glare. I now knew where I would dump the phone. But before I did, it was time to make one last call.